to you, Eli.”
“Oh, excuse me? Did I need to wait to be called on? I hadn’t realized that we were back in elementary school.”
“Cool it, you two,” Carlos said firmly. He knew his siblings could go at it for hours once they got started, but they were closer to each other than to anybody else on the planet. They went to the same college and even now they lived next door to each other in matching town houses.
“He started it.” Ava looked at Eli.
“Well, I’m finishing it. What were you saying, Ava?”
“I’ve loved this island since Daddy first brought us here as kids. I want to get married here, but there is no venue that’s large enough.” She looked up at him with the big, soulful brown eyes that had gotten her out of a lot of trouble when she was a kid. “But this place looks as if it could easily hold two hundred and fifty guests.”
“You want to get married here?” He wasn’t sure why he was surprised to hear that. She was the one who’d suggested he look for a house on this island five years ago.
“Yes, and I came to ask you to walk me down the aisle. Will you?”
He was surprisingly touched by her question. It seemed as if the only things he’d felt the past few months were anger and emptiness. “What about Mom? I thought she was going to walk you.”
“I want you to do it. You take care of me. And if Daddy can’t be there I want his favorite person in the world to.”
“Okay,” he said. It was all he could say. He couldn’t turn her down, even if he wanted to.
Her eyes lit. “Okay to walking me down the aisle? Or okay to me having the wedding here?”
“Okay to both.” His father would have wanted it that way. He would have wanted his baby girl to marry in a place that she loved, and it was Carlos’s job to make sure all of his father’s dreams came true. Even if he wasn’t around to see them anymore.
“Thank you, Carlos!” She pulled him into a hard hug. “You going to fix up this place before the wedding, right?”
“Fix it up?” He looked around him. There was barely any furniture and the walls were white and bare but it looked fine to him.
“Yes, fix it up. Make it look more like a home than an abandoned oceanfront warehouse.”
“I’ve got to agree with Ava on that one. This house looks like a big, expensive dump.”
“Dump? It might be a bit sparse, but it’s not a dump.”
The twins looked at each other, communicating without words in a way that always drove him crazy.
“Fine. Whatever. I’ll fix it up. What do you think I should do with it?”
“I don’t know.” Elias shrugged. “It’s your place.”
“Get an interior designer.” Ava rolled her eyes.
“A what?”
“A decorator. You know, a professional person who will make this place look less like a rich serial killer lives here and more like the superstar athlete you are.”
“Where do I get one of those? The phone book?”
“The internet?” Elias suggested.
Ava rolled her eyes. “You don’t just pick a stranger. You get a personal recommendation.”
“From who, exactly?”
“I don’t know.” She went into the freezer, took a pie out and placed in the oven. “Don’t you have friends that have homes you like? You could ask one of them.”
“I never paid attention to their houses.” He truthfully had not. Plus, a lot of his player friends were married. Their wives took control of most of the household stuff.
“Well, what about your condo in Miami? Who did that?” Elias asked.
“It came like that. I bought the model unit.”
They all were quiet for a moment. “What about that little inn we rented out for Mommy’s birthday? It had just been redone. You liked it there, Carlos. I can call and find out who did it.”
He had liked it there. It was so different from all the other places in Miami, unlike all the other places he had stayed while on vacation. He had felt truly relaxed then, one of the rare times he’d felt that way since he became a man. He couldn’t describe what the place had looked like, but it had had a homeyness to it that had made him not want to leave.
“Okay. Let me know who it is and I’ll set it up.”
* * *
Virginia Andersen rubbed her forehead as she reentered her tiny rented office. The Miami heat and the stress of the day were finally getting to her. She had just returned from Mrs. Westerfield’s house for the second time that day after spending two hours showing her drape samples.
In every color imaginable.
It wasn’t as if Virginia minded showing the elderly woman the drapes. It was her job as an interior designer to do so. And since Mrs. Westerfield was her only paying client at the moment, she didn’t really have a choice. She just had one complaint. It was a small one, really. The elderly woman used her more like a personal assistant than an interior designer. Virginia walked her bichon frise, went to the grocery store with her and helped her picked out what to wear on her dates with someone she referred to as her gentlemen caller. And none of that bothered her. Mrs. Westerfield was fabulous with her love of vintage clothes, art and Latin culture. It was just...
It wasn’t her job.
And when her parents called to see what she was working on—and they always wanted to know what she was working on—she wanted to tell them she was using her eye for design and color to decorate beautiful homes, not picking up dog mess.
It was important to her that she prove to her parents that she was successful, or at least supporting herself in a lifestyle that they saw fit. Her father was a high-ranking military official, and her mother was a mathematics professor at an Ivy League college back in her home state of New Jersey. They’d had big plans for their twins.
But none of them included being an almost starving artist, and that was just what Virginia had been before she’d opened her design firm. Moving from state to state, chasing boyfriend after artistic boyfriend and painting. Some of her pieces had sold for big bucks, but it was never enough for her parents. They’d never understand her need to splash colors onto a blank canvas. They were too practical to see how a painting on a wall could bring someone joy.
And while they would have much rather had her be an actuary or an engineer, they’d never denied her the opportunity to learn about the things she loved. She had a bachelor of fine arts in painting with a minor in interior design and a master’s degree in art history. She was educated, just like any child of Colonel and Dr. Andersen should be, and they felt she should have a job suited to that education.
She’d been all ready to ignore her parents’ wishes and follow her heart, until her heart had led her here to Miami. She had come here at the request of her last boyfriend. Burcet, a beautiful Moroccan man with striking bronzed skin and long, wavy black hair, had grown up in France and spoke the most perfect French. He was a sculptor, passionate about his work and incredibly sweet and sensitive.
She had followed him when he’d told her he was going to get his big break, asking her to support his dreams, promising that once he hit it big he would return the favor. But after six months here he had disappeared, leaving a goodbye note taped to her microwave, never telling her why he left, just saying that he couldn’t be his true self with her.
That was when she’d taken a long hard look at her life. She’d been twenty-eight then, sleeping on a mattress in an un-air-conditioned studio apartment because she’d wanted to live the bohemian-artist lifestyle. And because she’d